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StudentProspector Case Study

Click below to listen to a recent interview with Helen Armitage given by our very own Kathryn Noel.

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Background:

Bond University is a private, independent not-for-profit institution located in The Gold Coast, in Southeast Queensland, Australia. The school has just under 3,000 students, 50 percent of which are foreign and dwell from more than 70 different countries.

As the Manager of International Programs in the Office of Recruitment and Admissions, Helen Armitage is responsible for recruiting students from North America and the Scandinavian region.

Her duties may actually be similar to yours. They include:

  • Managing the budget
  • Recruiting students
  • Advertising
  • Working with international representatives
  • Developing strategies for the university, the international audience and the faculty

One of her favorite parts of the job involves meeting with students in their home countries and then seeing them apply and helping their transition as they settle in. She says it is fulfilling to see them grow and realize their potential.

But in order to watch students grow, she first has to attract students to the school, and that is where StudentProspector comes in. Our advisor liaison, Kathryn Noel, sat down with Helen to interview her on the benefits of using StudentProspector to recruit students. The results follow.

Objective:

Like any good school, Bond looks for ambitious, hard-working students who want to be engaged in the community. To find these students, Helen and her staff employ a number of tactics, including:

  • Web and print advertising
  • Attending seminars, conferences, fairs, etc.
  • Working with in-country representatives who promote the school to the right students
  • StudentProspector, a tool that allows recruiters like Helen to use the Internet to proactively search for students who have requested to receive information by schools just like theirs

Solution:

"I just heard that we were using StudentProspector to generate leads and it was really, really good."

Helen has been at Bond for almost four years, and the school was already using StudentProspector. In fact, they utilize StudentProspector PLUS, where StudentProspector staff members pull a list of appropriate students every month and supply this list to the school, thereby taking the hard-part out of the recruiters’ hands.

She uses these monthly downloads more than any other aspect of StudentProspector, saying that the tool pinpoints specific students with specific interests who are considering Bond, and that it, "Covers all the study areas, it covers everything we need to know about the students."

Result:

"Through the leads that you generate for us, we do continue to renew every year."

Helen uses StudentProspector perfectly, meaning she uses the tool to find interested students and then she starts a dialogue with them in an effort to convert them from inquiries to enrollments.

She says that, through StudentProspector, "We generate quite a good number of downloads of students who have queried or who have interests in certain areas that we may offer, so we definitely pull down once a month and then we generate e-mail for all of the students who queried, and we do quite rigorous follow-up with these students as well."

She often doesn’t have time to use some of the other helpful features of StudentProspector, but she often wishes she did, because, "It’s a great tool, it really is."

When asked if she would recommend it to colleagues, she replied, "I would assume that most universities would use it [already] because I know it’s such a large tool to generate leads."

She went on to say, "If someone asked my advice from another university, I would definitely encourage them to do it."

After more than four years of use, Bond University continues to use StudentProspector to help them find the type of dedicated, hard-working foreign students they want for their campus. Considering how much she is responsible for, and how busy her work day is, we at StudentProspector are proud to be able to take at least some of the stress off this dedicated member of the international education community.

Thank you, Helen, both for your time, and for all you do for the field.